Ascending the Boneyard

Gr 9 Up—Caleb Tosh has only one escape in his life: the Boneyard, a computer game. It is his reward for an angry father, an absent mother, and a brother whose life was forever altered because of Tosh. In the Boneyard, Tosh is in control and in charge. Everything changes the day birds start falling from the sky and die en masse. Tosh begins seeing signs that convince him he needs to Ascend and to take out the final boss. Reality becomes distorted as his obsession with the game leads to surprising revelations about Tosh and his family. This is a finely tuned and complex story focusing on the increasingly blurred lines between one's real life vs. one's cyber life. Watson quickly creates sympathy for Tosh with descriptions of his rough home life, but it is through Tosh's quest that a layered character emerges. The story is not always accessible. The clues that the protagonist follows lead readers down unstable paths that show Tosh to be an unreliable narrator. The narrative structure centers on, to a degree, the complex decisions that take place in current video games. Not every door is a success, and not every boss is beatable—including the "bosses" in his own mind. This is a slower-paced novel, particularly at the beginning, but readers who invest in Tosh's struggles and triumphs will be rewarded by how Watson pulls the strings of reality together.